What happened after the group of Soviet operatives, known in Lubyanka as “the Administration for Special Tasks,” snatched Kutepov from the street remains a mystery. Was chloroform immediately fatal due to the general’s weak heart, or did Kutepov die on his way to Moscow? There was also a theory that he was brought safely to Moscow, to Lubyanka, and died there during interrogations. In any case, the operation was one of the most successful for the Administration for Special Tasks, and the lesson was not missed by Soviet operatives, including Nahum Eitingon, who would become its deputy head that year. This was a new method of dealing with political opponents of the Kremlin who had left Russia. Seven years later, in September 1937, General Yevgeny Miller, who succeeded Kutepov as leader of ROVS, was also abducted in Paris and brought to Moscow, where he was killed.13
But it was another group of exiles—the generation of Soviet party officials who fled to the West—that truly worried the Kremlin. First among these exiles, of course, was Trotsky. The former leader of the revolution posed a real existential threat to Stalin’s rule.
By the 1930s, the Kremlin urgently needed to do something about Trotsky.
CHAPTER 4
“THE HORSE”
Well into the late 1930s, Soviet intelligence kept hunting down Stalin’s archenemy Trotsky. Trotsky’s archive was stolen in Paris; his son mysteriously died after what seemed like a rather simple surgery; his closest associate was kidnapped, and his body was later found in the Seine.1 Moving from Turkey in 1933, first to France, then to Norway in 1936, Trotsky left Europe for Mexico.2 When he did so, the city of New York suddenly became important for Lubyanka. After all, New York was an important center for Trotskyites’ activities, and geographically it was closer to Latin America than other émigré centers. After giving the topic careful consideration, Soviet spymasters came to the conclusion that local activists could provide a point of access to Trotsky himself.
At a prewar co-op building in Greenwich Village, just two blocks south of Union Square, there was unusual, even feverish, activity: gloomy men from Moscow who called themselves Richard or Michael came and went frequently from the ninth floor. The ninth floor was home to the offices of Earl Browder, head of the Communist Party in the United States. What most New Yorkers didn’t know was that the US Communist Party owned the entire building. And right now, the US Communist Party was in a state of mobilization.
The American names of the visitors with strong Russian accents didn’t suit them very well. Everyone understood these gloomy men were coming straight from the Soviet secret police. And the Richards and Michaels brought urgent orders: US Communists were to gather information on Trotskyites.
Browder’s deputy, Jacob Golos, was happy to help. Golos was a legend in the Comintern and Soviet intelligence.3 A Russian Jew who belonged to the first generation of Bolsheviks, Golos had been banished by the tsar to Siberia for organizing an underground printing house but had escaped his Siberian exile and fled first to China and then to Japan before finally making it to the United States. In 1915, he became a naturalized US citizen.4 With a prominent nose and curly hair, the energetic Golos—who never lost his heavy Russian accent—was a founding father of the Communist Party of the United States.
Golos had a God-given talent for recruitment. Few could compete with him. In New York, he ran several networks, each with dozens of agents. As an ardent Stalinist, infiltrating local Trotskyite organizations was at the top of his priority list. When the Moscow men asked for contacts, Golos knew just who they needed.
One meeting that would prove crucial was arranged between a gloomy Russian and Ruby Weil, a young American woman from Indiana. Then in her early thirties, Ruby was a secret Communist, trained in infiltration techniques. Her job was to penetrate international Trotskyite organizations, and she was good at it.5
The Russian knew that Ruby was on very friendly terms with Hilda Ageloff. Hilda was one of three young, sociable sisters who knew Trotsky personally. Indeed, two of the Ageloff sisters had done secretarial work for him.
At their meeting in New York, the Russian introduced himself to Ruby as John Rich.6 He told Ruby he had plans for her: she was going to do an important job for her Soviet comrades. Ruby was handed a stack of cash. At first, Ruby was reluctant to take the money. She was a Communist out of conviction, not for material gain. But she was told it was important for her to be better dressed. She would also need the money to pay her phone bills. There was a plot against Stalin’s life, she was told, and her help was needed. So she agreed.7
Her task, as outlined by the Russian, was not difficult: Ruby was to accompany one of the three Ageloff sisters—Sylvia, a twenty-eight-year-old Brooklyn social worker and occasional secretary to Trotsky—when Sylvia traveled to Paris to participate in a Trotskyite international congress. Bespectacled, shy, and slightly awkward, Sylvia was a polyglot, fluent in Spanish, French, and Russian (the sisters’ mother was from Russia). In Paris, Ruby’s job was to introduce Sylvia to a certain man who would make himself known to Ruby when they arrived.
Ruby got started right away. She was almost immediately lucky—Sylvia was more than happy to have a traveling companion and especially one who also believed in communism.
The trip across the ocean took many days but was pleasant, and the young women arrived in Paris in June 1938. While Sylvia stayed behind at their hotel, Ruby said she needed some fresh air. Once alone, she made her way to an address she had been given by John Rich to meet a comrade named Gertrude. It was this Gertrude who introduced her to Stalin’s agent. The agent, a young and handsome man, said his name was Jacques Mornard. When Ruby saw him, she immediately grasped his role: that of a handsome lover for Sylvia.
Ruby took Jacques back to the hotel where she was staying with Sylvia and made introductions. Ruby’s new acquaintance told Sylvia he was a Belgian businessman who was enjoying himself in France. He seemed completely disinterested in politics and had a great passion for theater and music. Sylvia quickly fell for Jacques, and they spent seven wonderful months together in Paris.
What Sylvia didn’t know was that her Jacques was in fact a Spaniard named Ramon Mercader, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War. For now, his job was to cultivate this new relationship and wait.
In January 1939 Barcelona fell to the troops commanded by El Caudillo, the fascist dictator Francisco Franco. In March, Madrid surrendered. The civil war in Spain was over. The Republican forces, whose cause Moscow had supported, had lost, and Nahum Eitingon’s chiefs at Lubyanka saw no reason for him to remain in the country where he had been stationed since 1936. His job there, as chief of the Soviet secret service’s Spanish station, was done. Eitingon had safely ferried the country’s high-ranking Republican officials and Communists to France and helped transfer Spain’s gold to the Soviet Union. He had also made some promising recruits among the Trotskyites who fought there. It was time to go home.
But back in Moscow, Eitingon didn’t like what he saw. The chief of foreign intelligence, a successor to Trilisser, was in prison, awaiting a verdict. For years, Trilisser’s successor had fruitfully run a network of secret agents in Europe and had liquidated many enemies of the Soviet regime. But he had failed to kill Trotsky, and that failure had angered Stalin.
As a rule, if a high-ranking Soviet official fell, he did not fall alone. Instead, he brought his whole entourage down with him. Now Eitingon was being followed. Being the gifted spy that he was, it didn’t take him long to spot the operatives trailing him down the streets wherever he went.
Eitingon made a phone call to his boss at Lubyanka. “It’s been ten days since I arrived in Moscow,” Eitingon began. “I am sure my phone is tapped… I’m under constant surveillance. Please report to your leadership: if they want to arrest me, let them do it now. They do not need to play children’s games.”8
His voice did not sound nervous or frightened. He seemed to convey that he was ready for whatever fate had in store for him. But Eitingon was lucky once again: the man on the other end of the pho
ne told him not to worry, that nobody was going to arrest him. The Communist Party needed him and his experience. Stalin still wanted Trotsky dead.
It had now been a decade since Trotsky left Russia, but people of Eitingon’s age would never forget what a popular leader he had been. The founder of the Red army, Trotsky was second only to Lenin when it came to the people’s love. Before his fall from power, he was nearly omnipresent: the Soviets named cities and streets after him. A submarine called Trotsky patrolled the Black Sea during the civil war. Air force planes protecting Moscow from its enemies took off from the military aerodrome named after him.
No wonder, then, that in the 1930s, Trotsky had been Russia’s most prominent political exile. He had not had an easy time of it, traveling from one unwelcoming European country to another. Nonetheless, thousands of his supporters across Europe and in both Americas were still ready to die for him. The Soviet secret police had his closest followers in their crosshairs, and their secret agents had been infiltrating Trotsky’s inner circle since he left Russia, but they had never managed to get him.
The task became even more complicated after Trotsky and his wife moved to Mexico. They settled in a beautiful and highly fortified villa in Mexico City’s Coyoacán suburbs, where they hoped their lives would be safer than they had been in Europe.9 But after two years there, Stalin wanted Trotsky dead even more than ever. The Russian leader believed that a huge war was on the horizon, and he needed his rival out of the way before it started. In 1939, he made it explicitly clear that he wanted Trotsky killed within the year.10
Eitingon was the man Stalin assigned to do it. The experienced intelligence officer agreed immediately and got to work. He knew the stakes and wanted to be certain of the result. He came up with two separate plans—one simple and cruel, the other sophisticated and complex. Both would be carried out by agents sent to Mexico who had never been used in operations against Trotsky or Trotskyites before. The two groups of assassins would have no idea about one another’s existence. The newcomers all had to operate on their own and, just in case, keep their distance from the stations in both Mexico and New York.
Eitingon was given a free hand when it came to using Soviet intelligence resources. With all possible options at his fingertips, he decided to rely on the agents he had recruited in Spain and the contacts provided by Jacob Golos’s network in New York.
To use people recruited during the civil war in Spain seemed like a reasonable idea. After all, they knew how to kill, and they hated Trotskyites, whom they considered competitors and enemies in the battle to institute the right kind of communism in the world. And because he had supported their cause in their country, they loved Stalin.
Indeed, the Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros, who had fought in Spain, felt such a strong affinity for Stalin that when Eitingon asked, Siqueiros immediately agreed to lead a group of assassins in Mexico. Eitingon’s choice was unorthodox. Although Siqueiros had battle experience in Spain, the idea of having a famous Mexican painter lead a group of armed people to attack Trotsky’s well-guarded home appeared very risky. But then again, Eitingon had never hesitated to take risks.
He named the group led by Siqueiros “The Horse.” This group was to launch the first assassination operation against Trotsky—a brutal frontal attack.
Trotsky’s villa in Coyoacán was specially fortified to protect him and his family. The villa was equipped with a watchtower that overlooked the street, a high fence with electrified wires, and an automated alarm signal that was active at all times. Five Mexican police officers were on duty outside, and several guards watched the villa around the clock from the inside. In addition to Trotsky, the villa was home to Trotsky’s wife, Natalia, and his teenage grandson, whose mother, a daughter of Trotsky from his first marriage, had committed suicide following her husband’s imprisonment and execution in Russia as a Trotskyite.
Eitingon knew all of this. The Soviet secret police had an agent inside the fortress, and she provided Eitingon with a detailed plan of the villa before she was recalled to Moscow. She also provided all details of how Trotsky’s bodyguards operated.
Among them were some passionate young American Trotskyites, recent college graduates who had not been given proper military training. For Trotsky, they were not the best option, but they were vigilant and available.
One of the Americans, a twenty-five-year-old named Robert Sheldon Harte, had fallen in love with Mexico and its exotic nature—so much so, in fact, that he bought several colorful birds and kept them in the garden. Once he was so engaged building a bird cage that he handed a gate key to the workers who were doing some renovations at the villa. “You might prove to be the first victim of your own carelessness,” said Trotsky sadly.11
The Old Man, as Trotsky was known among Stalinists and Trotskyists, was still strong and full of energy, but all the catastrophes that had befallen his friends and family after his expulsion from Russia deprived him of sleep. The evening of May 23, 1940, was beautiful and warm, and he went to bed late. But he still couldn’t fall asleep until he swallowed a sleeping pill.12
Trotsky’s grandson, fourteen-year-old Seva, slept in the bedroom next to his grandparents. In the middle of the night, someone tried the door from the garden. The door scraped the floor, making a noise that woke Seva up. He suddenly saw a silhouette coming in and thought it was someone from the house, but the shooting started. He threw himself to the floor and hid under the bed.13 The quiet night was engulfed by the sound of machine gun fire. Attackers in uniform smashed into Seva’s room and fired through the bed where Seva was hiding, wounding his foot.14 Then they rushed off.
On the other side of the wall, Trotsky and his wife were lying in a corner on the floor. They heard a loud scream: “Grandfather!” But they were under crossfire and couldn’t move. Soon the shooting in the room stopped. “They have kidnapped him,” whispered Trotsky. The sounds of gunfire moved on, to the patio. Then came silence. The intruders were gone. The attack had lasted no more than twenty minutes.
Everybody who lived in the house gathered in the patio. Seva was there too—a bullet had scratched his toe, but he was alive. Mysteriously, nobody was killed or seriously injured, but one man disappeared: young Robert Harte, who was on duty that night.
The follow-up investigation revealed that just before dawn, more than twenty men in police uniforms had disarmed and tied up the sentries outside the villa—without firing a shot. When they got to the gate, one of them talked to Harte, and he opened the doors. They ran into the courtyard and disarmed Trotsky’s guards. The attackers then placed machine guns behind the trees opposite Trotsky’s bedroom and opened fire. To be sure of their results, the raiders threw incendiary grenades into the house and a big bomb into the courtyard, which failed to go off. When they thought it was clear that Trotsky couldn’t still be alive, they left. While leaving, the attackers kidnapped Robert Harte.
A month later, the Mexican secret police dug up Harte’s body on a farm outside Mexico City—the same farm that had been rented by two Stalinist agents. When Siqueiros, who had led the attackers, was arrested, he did not deny his participation in the raid. But he maintained that they had never had any intention of killing Trotsky: he, for one, just wanted to protest Trotsky’s presence in his country. Siqueiros also claimed that he organized the attack on his own. Later, he was released on bail.
Trotsky, however, understood all too well what had happened. “The author of the attack is Joseph Stalin, through the medium of the Soviet secret police,” he told the Mexican police.15 But he couldn’t understand why Harte, whom he had loved so much, had opened the gates to the attackers.
Eitingon knew the answer. It was he, after all, who had ordered the Soviet agent who’d gotten Harte to open the gate to move from Europe to Mexico. There, on Eitingon’s orders, he had befriended the curious young Harte, and later, when he knocked on the gates just before dawn, Harte opened them for his new friend. That was how the raiders broke in. Harte’s mistake cost him hi
s life—just as Trotsky had prophesied. Afterward, Harte was a liability, so the Soviet agents liquidated him. Trotsky—correctly—never believed Harte worked for the Soviet secret police. If he had, Harte’s work as a guard would have given him plenty of opportunities to kill Trotsky silently and run away.
The botched attack was a spectacular failure for Eitingon. He had not participated in it himself and now regretted having kept his distance. He would have never allowed Trotsky to survive; those unprofessional peasants and miners led by a painter—they should have checked every room after they opened fire. Instead, they just ran away after shooting nearly two hundred bullets.
Eitingon sent an encrypted radio message about the disastrous outcome of the operation, but it failed to be delivered to Moscow in time.16 Stalin learned about the attack from the Soviet news agency TASS. It seemed Eitingon’s luck had run out.
Two days later, Eitingon asked Moscow to give him another chance. Stalin summoned Lubyanka’s generals to the Kremlin. He asked only one question: How much of the Soviet intelligence network in New York was compromised? He was assured that Eitingon had followed instructions closely and hadn’t used any agents from New York’s spy ring.
Hearing this, Stalin agreed to give Eitingon a second chance.17
After the May attack, the house on Avenida Viena was further fortified. New watchtowers were erected, and steel shutters closed the windows. Now it was a real fortress—one that reminded Trotsky of the first prison in which he had been jailed in Russia.18
But Eitingon was not going to storm the villa again.
CHAPTER 5
“THE MOTHER”
Nahum Eitingon had a plan B—a second operation, already in the making. It was to be executed by a group of operatives he called “The Mother.”
Ruthless and efficient, Eitingon decided to use the woman he had recruited in Spain; he was always good with women—and this one depended entirely on him.
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